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November Issue 2005
Sumter Gallery of Art in Sumter, SC, Features Works by Juan Logan
The Sumter Gallery of Art, in Sumter, SC, in mounting perhaps it's most ambitious show to date, expands its horizons, and reaches out to a wider, more diverse audience with the exhibit, Juan Logan: Close Inspection. The exhibit will open on Nov. 18 and continue through Dec. 30, 2005.
Logan is one of the most exciting and challenging
visual artists working in America today. Logan was born in Nashville,
TN, in 1946. He is a long time resident of Belmont NC, where he
makes his home on land settled by his family in 1848.
Logan received his MFA from the Maryland Institute College of
Art in Baltimore and launched his artistic career in 1960. His
works have been featured in over 250 solo and group exhibitions
nationally and internationally since 1969. He has received numerous
grants and fellowships, including the John Michael Kohler Arts
Center - Arts/Industry Program (2003-2004); the North Carolina
Arts Council (1991-1992, 2001-2002); the Lannan Foundation (1995);
Phillip Morris Corporation (1996-1998); University of North Carolina
(1999-2001); and the McColl Center for Visual Arts Residency (2000).
In addition to these grants and fellowships, Logan's work is included
in over 60 public and corporate collections including the Philadelphia
Museum of Art, the Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, the Mint Museum
of Art, Charlotte, the Museum of African-American Art, Los Angeles,
and the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY. Logan is currently
Director of Graduate Studies in Studio Art at UNC, Chapel Hill.
Logan's work reflects a heightened awareness
of issues related to inequality, social change, injustice and
racial pride. Juan Logan: Close Inspection features intriguing
sculpture, mixed media, and installations that challenge viewers
to experience another side of American culture. Logan's message
is that the human condition is shared, and that our mutual interconnectedness
comes with a responsibility to understand the consequences of
our own exclusionary behavior. His work turns on both historical
and linguistic codes, often employing recognizable icons of history,
race, and gender in many works, to confront the viewer. Other
pieces serve as points of contemplation.
Logan says his reliquaries (shrines used to house sacred relics)
"protect and hide all those things that you know about but
don't need to be saying, not as a secret, but more as a place
to be dealing with these issues in a solemn way." They contain
spiritually charged artifacts that offer affirmations and help
to transform sorrow and yearning.
As Ken Bloom, Director, Tweed Museum of Art, Duluth, MN, has written,
"Juan Logan's imagery mourns and affirms, transforms and
quietly asks us to consider the psychic cost of insensitivity
and ignorance and to confer the gift of our humanity in the wake
of brutality. His message comes to us in part through ritualized
forms, a symbolic language constructed of graphic signs and objects
the artist has elected from otherwise unnoticed day-to-day artifacts".
Over the course of many years, Logan has observed
and commented upon human behavior through his artwork. While assimilating
into his lexicon the contradictions in human behavior, his symbolic
vocabulary broadened in scope and became more graphic in its representation.
As his work developed a means to interpret conflict, denial, belonging
and spirituality, so too has his voice developed, its tone gravitating
toward understatement. The source of much of the imagery that
fuels Logan's engine is located within a particular milieu of
the rural South; his artisanship, as well, stems from an inspiring
family lineage and the ethos of craftsmanship.
Whereas celebrations, icons and rituals of black life in the rural
South illuminate the underpinnings of the artist's background,
Logan is also an artist whose vision incorporates a universal
view of community. Logan's many stories, histories and memories
are layered one upon another. Logan states, "I'm finding
ways to say what I need to say in more quiet and subtler ways.
It is the love of the material as a tool, and getting the most
out of it. Whatever my original feelings and intent, as time passes
the particular shape or form or color that may have had one meaning
to me may become different from what I originally intended. In
the layering process the whole story is never on the surface."
Logan's artful humanism is conditioned by an acute awareness of
the critical discipline necessary to make lasting work that satisfies
one's own impulses yet is capable of reaching the hearts of others.
For further information check out the SC Institutional Gallery listings, call the gallery at 803/775-0543, or at (www.sumtergallery.org).
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